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Cleaning the Mouse Cage

Awwww. Isn’t that sweet? That’s my son, playing with his pet mice. And just after this shot, one of them peed on the shoulder of his favorite shirt. Awwww!

He’s in the bathtub, playing with the mice, because that’s where the mice can’t desperately escape…er…accidentally get lost in the house. I forget that people won’t know that the bathtub is used as a Mouse Pen when I tell them that my sons play with the mice in the tub. They get a baffled look on their faces and tilt their heads to the side and ask, “Wait….your sons take baths with the mice?”

That gets me every time. Major source of amusement. As if the boys take baths with the mice, like Alice and the mouse swimming in Alice’s tears in Alice in Wonderland. (What a freaky book THAT is, and the movies are worse.) I usually correct them right away, but next time I’m going to string my victim…er…friend along for a few minutes and ramble on about how clean and Strawberry fresh smelling it makes the mice.

This is the picture of the day because I cleaned the mouse cage today while the boy entertained the mice. The boy offered to clean the cage, but I told him NO. The boy is not very dexterous and I can only imagine all the pee soaked mouse bedding scattered on the bathroom floor, stuck to puddles of water.

The boy also offered to clean the litter boxes when we had cats, and I told him NO then, too. Sometimes those little pee balls (oh, please, please stop blogging about pee) would stick to the side of the litter box and I’d have to pry them off. It was an exercise in physics: How much force should I use to pry off the pee ball without causing it to shoot through the air and skitter across the floor? A tricky calculation and not always skillfully executed. I can see Boy prying off a pee ball and it catapulting into the air with bits of litter flying from it, like shrapnel, getting in Boy’s eye.

Remember those Messy Marvin commercials for Nestlé’s Chocolate milk? Ralphie from A Christmas Story is in them. They’re on youtube. And now that I’ve said that, you’ve lost interest in me and are going to go to youtube and watch a couple, aren’t you?